On Predictability
by SkywardShadow
Summary: Kyoko never had trouble predicting people until she met Naegi. (Oneshot; SPOILERS for seasons 1 & 2 of the anime)


**A/N: I enjoyed this show way more than I thought I would, so here's some ramblings from my favorite character! SPOILERS for both seasons of the anime, and please don't comment telling me that the novels/games/whatever have totally jossed my story; I'm basing this solely on the show. Enjoy! :D**

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_On Predictability_

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She was five years old when the family dog went missing, and Kyoko poured her heart into finding that dog—printing out posters, knocking on neighbors' doors, anything she could think of—until the day her father sat her down gently, put a hand on her shoulder, and explained to her that Haimaru had been found by a nice family further out in the country, and he was very happy there, and it would be selfish to bring him back just because they missed him, wouldn't it?

It was the first time her father had ever lied to her, and Kyoko made sure to memorize what that lie did to his face, so that she could remember it later.

She had always paid more attention than most, especially to the little things nobody else ever seemed to notice or care about. At the time Kyoko didn't understand that this was a skill, nor how it could be put to use. But she would grow to understand.

A year after the Haimaru incident, her mother disappeared.

Kyoko never saw the body, but she assumed there must have been one, because the adults around her began to murmur things about suicide when they thought (they always thought) she wasn't paying attention. But their conclusion wasn't right—she thought it a gut feeling at first, and then she remembered why she felt so certain.

It was Kyoko who convinced the police, over the course of an interview in which the expressions of the two detectives in her living room went quickly from pity to shock and then to awe, that her mother's death had been a murder, not a suicide. She offered them memories of a strange car that had been parked in front of the house across the street (she remembered the license plate number, which the younger of the detectives wrote down with his mouth hanging slightly open), of a man's eyes lingering just a little too long while they shopped for groceries (he was wearing sunglasses inside, which she had noted as strange even at the time, but she'd seen enough of his face for the sketch artist), and within a month the case had been closed and the man who killed her mother was handed over to the courts.

Kyoko didn't follow the case any further. There was no point. What she did do was berate herself, over and over, for not saying something sooner. For not speaking up the very first time she noticed the car or the man in sunglasses, fearing to be thought childish. Jumping at shadows.

At six years old Kirigiri Kyoko swore to herself that she would never doubt her instincts again.

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When it comes to Naegi Makoto, her instincts confuse her.

By now she has been actively honing her detective skills for a long time. Reading people is second nature to her—an automatic process, and a simple one because humans are so easy to read. So easy to predict.

And in some ways Naegi is no different. He might even be an easier prospect for the way he wears his emotions so blatantly on his sleeve; when the first killing game began, he was the first person Kyoko felt confident enough to rule out as a potential mastermind. He is one of the most easily read people that she has ever known.

But he is not _predictable_, and this is what gives her pause.

There is one time, and only one, when he falls neatly into the pattern Kyoko would expect: when he lies to her about Sakura's motivations so soon after telling Kyoko that they should trust one another. And while in hindsight she understands his reticence, at the time Kyoko knows she reacts badly.

She had been so angry. It was a confusing anger—after all, hadn't Naegi done exactly what she expected him to do? Kept things from her, lied to her face? She shouldn't have been surprised.

She wasn't surprised. And that was what frustrated her, because Naegi had been surprising her ever since they met, and that isn't something easily done. She hasn't been _surprised_ by the things people do and say since she was five years old.

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(Kyoko still thinks of their first meeting as being in that gym at the center of Hope's Peak High School, even though she knows that's inaccurate now. She's wondered ever since if the two of them were friends before they all consented to have their memories wiped away—a concession made for the desperate hope of a future.

Kyoko's wondered about all of them, the classmates they watched die, the ones whose brutal, bloody murders she investigated with a cool and dispassionate eye. Had she been close to any of them, before? If she could somehow access that knowledge, would she have viewed their corpses with more than just professional interest and the faintest twinge of regret?

She could find the answers, she knows. Even erased files have to go somewhere; it would be easy for the Super High School Level Detective to dig them up. But that's one mystery Kyoko feels no desire to solve.)

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Naegi never lives down to her expectations again after that lie.

Instead he surprises her again, over and over. He puts his own life on the line to save hers, doesn't call her out on her own lie during her trial, insists on keeping the metaphorical gun pointed away from Kyoko—even when it swivels to point at Naegi himself.

Not once during Junko's fucked-up game had Kyoko felt as helpless and, fine, _despairing_ as when she thought she was about to watch Naegi die.

But he doesn't, and she doesn't, and somehow they both end up walking out of Hope's Peak High School alive.

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The outside world has become a nightmare, but at least it offers ample opportunities for Kyoko to do her work. She turns that dispassionate detective's eye on everything around her, analyzing potential weaknesses in systems and possible corruption in Future Foundation members before such things can become a problem. She has phone conferences with Togami (still acerbic as ever, but Kyoko knows she and the other members of the 78th graduating class are the only ones who ever get a personal audience with the head of the military division). She schedules her lunches to coincide with Asahina's, when she can (and asks after the community center Asahina is building from the ground up, the one she named the Ogami Sakura Center). She keeps tabs on Hagakure and even Fukawa, who's been putting her murderous inclinations to good use on Monokuma's leftovers.

And all the while, Kyoko keeps a careful eye on Naegi.

He continues to surprise her. Especially when she thinks that feat is no longer possible. His decision to rehabilitate the Remnants of Despair—to shelter them even at the cost of his own freedom—is one she really can't believe she didn't see coming, but she didn't.

Most people's nobler aspirations would have snapped in half by now. Most _people_ would have snapped by now, ground to shards under the heel of this unforgiving world they've inherited. They've been friends long enough that Kyoko knows better, but even now—in the midst of a second killing game, the cruelest of ironies given what they've already survived—there is a part of her that wonders if Naegi will finally succumb. As their friends and colleagues drop around them one by one, that suspicious part of Kyoko wonders if this will be the proverbial straw.

But Naegi doesn't break. He doesn't even bend.

It makes dying for him feel strangely easy, in the end.

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_No matter what happens, I will always be by your side._

Shuddering in silence as the poison works its way painfully through her veins, the world around her going black, Kyoko hopes he believes it.

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She wakes up to a pale sky (not blue, not yet, but no longer the color of blood and that's something) and smiles, because she knows he's done it. Hope—stubborn hope in the form of an exceptionally stubborn boy—has beaten out despair.

More evidence for this is the girl who kneels beside her, face awash with tears as she realizes her patient is awake. Still bleary, Kyoko takes in the bandages wrapped around the girl's arm and leg, and the fact that she's apparently managed to wake Kyoko from her self-imposed coma, and deduces that this is one Tsumiki Mikan: Super High School Level Nurse and (apparently former) Remnant of Despair.

"Tsumiki…senpai?" she tries, to test the theory, and a bout of renewed sobs confirms her suspicion.

She learns other things in due course. Asahina had found her notebook, as Kyoko thought she might, and drawn the same conclusion: that the deaths within the building were suicides. Most importantly, to Kyoko at least, is the knowledge that all of her fellow Hope's Peak graduates have survived this latest attempt to break them.

Kyoko has many more questions. One of them—and it's a more pressing one than she's likely to admit—is what Naegi's face will look like when he realizes she can still be by his side after all.

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Hope is not predictable, and neither are endings: who would have thought they'd end up back at this school?

The reopening of Hope's Peak has been a controversial decision, one Naegi has fought for every step of the way. Kyoko knows the other graduates have had a particularly difficult time with it; they've all come around, but some took longer than others. Even now Asahina swears she'll never set foot in the building again.

There has been no shortage of other naysayers, either. Nearly everyone involved in the reopening process has questioned whether it should be done, or _why_ it should be done. Some have said the place is clearly cursed, having seen so much death inside its walls; some say it should be left to stand as a monument, a warning against the arrogance of bureaucrats; others say that it should be forgotten entirely.

Kyoko has disagreed with that last statement repeatedly, and in the strongest possible terms: don't they all know the old adage, that it is those who _forget_ the past who run the risk of repeating it?

As for the other objections, she brushes them off without much difficulty. They are nothing more than superstition. Kyoko doesn't believe in superstition.

She believes in Naegi.

And Naegi hasn't given her a reason to doubt him. Six months to the day after he first proposed reopening the school—for all admissions this time, with no distinction between the unnaturally talented and the not—here they stand in an empty classroom. The cracks in the plaster have been patched; the desks have been repaired; the blood on the walls has been diligently scrubbed off.

(And yet Kyoko swears sometimes she can smell it, coppery and pungent, if she stands in one place for too long. Illogical or not, it still feels like corpses wait for her down every hallway. She understands Asahina's reticence completely.)

Naegi sits alone at a wooden desk, as if he's forgotten he's no longer a student.

"We're going to do it better this time," he says without looking at her.

It's such a pitiful statement, part of her thinks—humanity has always deluded itself into thinking that _this time_, somehow, things would be better than every other time they strove for something great and fell instead into darkness.

But part of her thinks that failure would be the most predictable thing in the world. And Naegi has never stopped surprising her.

So she says, "I know." And then, "Are you ready, Principal?"

He turns to her with a smile that puts the setting sun to shame.

"Ready as I'll ever be," he says, standing. "And you, Kirigiri-san?"

She lets herself smile in return. "More ready than you are, by the sound of it. You'll have to get used to sounding more authoritative, you know."

Naegi is blushing slightly, laughing at himself the way he's always willing to do, and Kyoko has never felt so sure of her loyalty to a single person. It doesn't seem strange to her at all that Naegi will now sit where her father once did; she thinks Kirigiri Jin would have approved of his replacement.

"Could I have a moment?" she hears herself ask.

"Of course!" Naegi says quickly, moving past her towards the door. At the last second, after a pause during which Kyoko swears she can _hear_ him gathering his courage, he backtracks and kisses her lightly on the cheek.

He doesn't give her a chance to respond before he's blurting out "I'll see you at the meeting, Kirigiri-san," and then disappearing down the hallway. Curiously, Kyoko pulls off a glove and reaches up to touch her cheek. She's surprised to find that it's warm.

_Unpredictable as always_. And here she's been thinking he wouldn't make any kind of move unless she offered him a written invitation. Perhaps one engraved in granite.

Shaking her head and smiling still, Kyoko looks out of the wide classroom window. The sky is starting to turn blue again at last.

She doesn't know what's going to happen next. But there's a lightness in her chest—one she can recognize now as hope—and Kyoko decides to trust in that.

She's learned to love unpredictability.


End file.
